


Pretty Girls Make Graves

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Series: Two Cuts of the Same Damned Stubborn Stone [1]
Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Blood, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 05:01:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11821752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: 'He looks older. Far older than she has ever seen him, and he has always seemed adult to her. Burdened by responsibilities she hopes never to acquire, but sometimes she notices the strength required by those broad shoulders to carry them.'__________Celaena's wild mouth has rubbed off on him, and Chaol finds himself standing before her in the dark, seeking... he knows not what. There is something between them, a golden chain that is tied somewhere deep, buried among the ache and stupidity - even more dangerous than their speech.





	Pretty Girls Make Graves

**Author's Note:**

> Set a week or so after the events of Throne of Glass. 
> 
> I have not read any of the later books, so I apologise if this contradicts canon, but then again, when have I ever respected that unruly thing? 
> 
> My attempt at processing how distraught and ruined I feel by Celaena and Chaol's broship.  
> #No Hetero

Celaena had never considered herself to be a particularly comforting person. Certainly, for those she cared for she would fight to the death for- or so she liked to think.

Even though she’d failed Sam.

Yet the first time Nehemia had come to her in the night, it had not been for playful gossip or fighting. Instead, something had convinced her that Celaena was the right person to run to with tears and an ever increasing death toll. Her shoulder had been chosen, out of all of the people who it could have swayed or manipulated; Not out of pity, but for genuine consolation.

And it had felt… like music, almost. Her own agenda, wants, desires, grudges had fled her body, hollowing her out to leave room for the flood of comfort, sympathy, and soft words that had poured from every orifice. She didn’t know the source of their flow - hadn’t even known she’d possessed such a capacity - and yet at the end, with Nehemia quieted, she herself had felt unusually cleansed. Incensed with fury at the King, yes, but for that moment only intellectually. Emotionally she felt raw. Dissolved and remade. New.

She had never expected something she’d once perceived as weakness to feel so powerful.

But it had been easy to dismiss the incident as a fluke. Afterall, who else could Nehemia go to for true mourning? Her guards? The Queen? Herself, Celaena reasoned, had been the only logical option.

And then Chaol appears at her door, and she feels her walls crack open like a damn. The wry insult she’d prepared evaporates on her tongue. Bile replaces it. Fury, anger, but more than anything, a bone deep ache. “Can I come in?” He forces out through gritted teeth, a swollen split lip. His voice sounds like gravel crunching beneath a fist slicked in blood, grinding it down with flesh and muscle alone. It sounds like his face looks.

Her voice eluding her, she nods and hurried back. It is not the first time someone had returned to her a ruin - on instinct she dashes to the bathroom and fills a washbowl with water, grabs a cloth, and reappears to find him slumped on her bed, leaning against the bedpost as if it is the only thing keeping him upright.

He looks older. Far older than she has ever seen him, and he has always seemed adult to her. Burdened by responsibilities she hopes never to acquire, but sometimes she notices the strength required by those broad shoulders to carry them. Judging by the concave slope of those shoulders now, yet another has been added, heavier than all the rest put together. “What happened?” She asks, hesitating. She is not sure she wants to know what could do this to Chaol and fill him with the opposite of justice and vengeance. Worse: at the back of her skull, an itch between her scalp and skull, she already knows the answer.

Chaol swallows. Glances up at her, a frightened girl in a nightgown with a trembling basin clutched at by thin fingers. For that sight alone, he forces a smile that, perhaps without the bloodied mouth, might have looked less like a grimace. “His majesty,” she thinks she might be sick, “took issue with my dinner conversation.”

“Your jokes _are_ atrocious,” she says, but the usual snark quivers and fails. Her chest is too tight. He looks just like Sam did, when he bit off more than he could chew. Just like that night she’d been sure he would die.

He huffs a laugh, but it catches and festers into a coughing fit. Blood and saliva spray out across his hands, her bedsheets. “What can I say, you’ve been a bad influence on me.”

Banter is wonderful, but she knows this is serious and she can’t stand it anymore. She sets the water down atop her dressing table and goes to sit beside him. Rests her fingers atop his shaking crimson hand. “Are you- will you be okay? You’re not-” Fired didn’t seem an appropriate term for being dismissed from the position of Captain of the Guard. Besides, she is certain the King would do far, far worse to anyone who disgraced themselves quite that acutely.

“No.” Chaol shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t like that. It was just to put me in my rightful place.” He runs a hand back through his hair, eyes glazed. “I- It was my fault. I pushed a point too hard. With how willful Dorian has been lately, the King is particularly sensitive to _opinions_ at the present moment.”

“I’m sure you had a good reason.” She pats his leg, numb with ache. This whole situation is so fucked up. She should had the man beside him, for he is the one in charge of enforcing the King’s will around here. And yet she finds him just as victim to his tyranny as she is, a glorified slave. “Though you’re still a moron. You should know better than to get into an argument with that bastard.”

He doesn’t even scold her for the blaspheme. Just looks at her with mournful eyes. “I was defending you,” he says, and she is sure he meant for it to be a snippy comment and yet she has never heard an insult so soaked in sadness. He sighs. “The King- It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t threatening anything. He wasn’t saying anything that was _untrue_. And yet I…” Trailing off, he buries his face in his hands and as he bends over, she sees the blood soaking through his shirt, in patterns she knows too well.

“You were flogged,” she realises aloud.

“Soundly whipped. That was what he ordered. And I deserved it. I have no right to criticise his Majesty’s choice of words, nor his judgement of his charges. I just-” Rubbing his temples, he does not continue, just stares at the opposite wall looking more lost and confused than a babe abandoned in the forest.

For a long while - too long - Celaena does not have anything to say. He is right: he should not have defended her. The evidence for that lies fresh and scarlet upon his back. Yet she cannot help but feel for his stupidity. Afterall, she knows it well: Running her mouth is and always has been her most favourite talent.

Without speaking, she rises and dunks the cloth in water. Not requesting permission, she begins to dab at his brow, his fouled cheekbones. “They beat you too?” Her voice is a dead thing, for if she breathed life into it she knows it will betray her rage, her pain at this whole fucked up affair they’re stuck in.

“There are members of the guard who do not appreciate my relationship with Dorian. And-”

“Your relationship with me.”

“...Some of them lost relatives to you and your guild.”

Falling back into silence, she cleans the crusted blood from his face. As she does, the distance in his gaze clears and all of a sudden he starts, standing. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Bit late for that now, isn’t it?” She teases him dryly, more concerned by how fiercely she does not want him to leave. Besides, “You need to have those wounds treated,” she nods to his back, “else they’ll get infected, and you’ll die. Then who will the King beat up for fun? Oh right, me. So sorry. I’m not letting that happen.”

“The infirmary…” he begins, but trails off.

“Won’t treat you?” She guesses.

“King’s orders.”

“He does love giving those.”

“It comes with the throne.”

Looking up at him, her mind wanders elsewhere, thinking back to the other man who visits her chambers in the night. The one with sapphire eyes so bright she can rarely sleep when she thinks of them. “Dorian won’t be like that,” she says fondly, staring at Chaol’s shoulder but not seeing. “He’ll be a _good_ King.”

“He will,” Chaol agrees. “If we can keep him alive until then.”

Both drifting to thoughts of elsewhere, they are quiet until the sound of blood tripping upon the stone tiles drags them back into reality. “Take your shirt off,” she orders shortly, moving to wring the cloth out and fetch fresh water. She returns to him topless, his back a mess of ploughed flesh, looking like a field worked by a horse gone mad. She cannot stop the hiss that escapes her throat.

“It’s not that bad.”

“Chaol, princess, I know whippings well. This is one of the uglier ones I’ve seen.”

“You’ve had worse.”

A little sadly, she concedes with a nod. “I have.” Cloth in hand, she sets the basin down behind him and soaks his back. “But that does not make this any less awful. That man is evil.”

“I used to believe in evil,” Chaol murmurs, his voice like taut wire as he endures the initial sting of her touch. “I used to think you were evil.”

“Fool,” she laughs darkly. “To use past tense.” She manages to get a laugh out of him for that.

“Clearly. Only a devil would save a man from dying by infection.”

“My most nefarious plot yet.”

Smiling unconsciously, they’re not awkward initially - but as she continues to stroke and rub at his back in the silence, she realises how close they are. How strongly she feels for this man. How strongly she does not want him to kiss her like Dorian did, how much she hates the idea of him spouting niceties and the floral talk of lovers. Yet the urge to hold him close and keep him… not safe, but to keep him _him_ is suffocating. She thinks he’s an idiot, and yet as she regards him and his gruesome back, all she can feel is caring.

He chooses that precise moment to glance back at her. She knows he sees her emotions in her expression, for he pales and swallows, that harsh mouth of his tightening. “This was a bad idea,” he mutters, and yet he does not look away. They just stare at one another. And she realises, to her horror, that she might love him.

Cloth pinched between two fingers, she forcibly turns him and takes his jaw in her grip. Glares at him straight in the eyes, studying him. She wishes she could convince herself that she does not understand it, does not know _why_ she feels this way, but of course she does. They are two cuts of the same damned stubborn stone, two blades wielding by other people, whilst fiercely independent as they rile beneath their chains, however loyal they may speak. Her confidence in herself is mirrored in her certainty in him. She knows him too well despite the briefness of their acquaintance, for all the conflict and perseverance as let her know herself rather well.

“I think you’re a straight-laced prick, Chaol,” she tells him, her voice finally strong, sure. “And at times I think I hate you more than anyone else in this entire stinking Kingdom.” Making sure he does not flinch from her gaze, she smirks. “But you are also one of my dearest friends. My staunchest protector. And for all you are - moron and all - I love you, Chaol Westfall.”

“Celaena,” he says hurriedly, pulling out of her grip. “I can’t-”

“Not like that, you dummy,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You start telling me how pretty I am, I punch you. Besides, I already know. And Dorian is quite good enough at stroking my ego. But I care about you, Chaol. And,” suddenly she is not so sure what she is saying. She has not been given the words to describe how she feels around him, what she becomes. “I love you. I do. But it’s not- it’s not like that.”

He stares at her as if she is mad, and she is sure he will scorn her. Regretting ever spouting such vulnerable honesty to the man who is good enough at teasing her already, she scowls and averts her eyes. Yet as she glances at him out of the corner of her vision, she sees that perplexity soften to pity. Empathy.

“It’s okay,” he says, averting his gaze before forcing it back to her. “I… I know what you’re trying to say. I-” he clears his throat, rolling his shoulders. “I think you’re twice the idiot I’ll ever be, and a pig-headed brat. But you’re also one of the fiercest, bravest, and somehow, most decent people I’ve ever met. It’s- it’s really confusing, actually.” He laughs nervously, and she can’t help but echo it. This is all too strange. Perhaps it is yet another weird dream. “You’re an assassin, and yet you’re one of the most honourable people I’ve met.”

“You know,” Celaena says with her signature patronising-Chaol-smirk, “honour amongst thieves is an expression for a reason.”

“And yet you’ve never stolen anything.”

“ _That you know of_.”

Chuckling, he finally, _finally_ relaxes. Looks her over, shuffles awkwardly again, and then pulls her in for one of their hugs. She should not feel so safe in his arms, and yet she trusts them as she does her own. They feel like an extension of her own limbs, even if that _are_ controlled by a do-gooder pig. Her palm finds his cheek again, and her thumb strokes across the fresh wounds marked upon it.

Turning her head less than an inch, she nudges in and kisses him soft upon the lips. This time, he does not starts, but kisses back, deft and sexless. All those months of protection, earned trust, and chaotic attachment pour out of her and into that kiss, as if she can protect him and whatever _this_ is forever through one kiss.

She knows that something is coming. A change has to happen, for they cannot continue as they are for long. Yet in that moment, her biggest fear is what shall happen between herself and the guard who knelt beside her on that fateful day, a chalk line’s width away from her fingertips. “Whatever happens, Chaol,” she whispers gently, burying her chin into his shoulder once more. “Thank you, for what you have done.”

“You too, Celaena Sardothien. Even though it may kill us all, I’m glad you ended up here.”

She smiles, genuinely touched. Yet in the back of her mind, all that resonates is that throwaway word of warning. _Please_ , she prays to the deities she long abandoned, _keep him safe_.

  



End file.
